The Happiness Project – thoughts so far

As you know by now I went and brought The Happiness Project – a book that I hoped would make me see life in a far more positive way. Within minutes of reading this book my mind started racing, in a matter of words author Gretchen Rubin was opening my eyes and mind to thoughts that many of us rarely stop to have.

How often do you stop and ask yourself…are you happy? Are you honestly content with your life at the moment?

If the answer is no then what can you do about it? And this is the key point – what are YOU going to do to change it? As Gretchen says “my life wasn’t going to change unless I made it change”. It got me thinking to how many times we moan about aspects in our life, I for one moan a lot about money and how stressed/busy I am but unless I evaluate this and try to make a change then I’m just going to be moaning forever more.

I think we become far too comfortable in the situations that we are in, whether it is down to time or whether it is down to effort either way we don’t invest enough to change this situation that is making us unhappy. Of course it’s easier not to bother, why invest all that energy into finding a new job, saving or joining the gym when you can just stay as you are?

What I believe this book is trying to do is to get you to stop, look at the root cause of what is making you unhappy and change it. Whether it be an actual change where we apply for a new job or we join a yoga class or a mental change where we aim to look at it from a different angle, we all should be stopping and making the right steps towards happiness.

“I needed to change the lens through which I viewed everything familiar” – again Gretchen nails it on the head – we need to be more glass half full rather than always having it empty.

Having only read a few pages I’ll keep you posted on how I get on and offer my thoughts on this one year Happiness Project that I’m definitely going to try as we could all do with a little more happiness in our lives. Vote in the poll below as would be interesting to see the results.

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2 thoughts on “The Happiness Project – thoughts so far”

Loved that book! Totally practical advice. I tried doing the table thing though, but it didn’t work for me on the long run (when you are student life changes very quickly) but the un-cluttering of closet and stuff you don’t need I do it at least every 6 months.